Monthly Archives: January 2015

As I was sitting at my desk deciding how I’m going to spend my time during my 1 week break from Amazon, my mind wandered back to where I was this time last year in my reselling journey. I remember that around this time I’d just gotten started with Amazon FBA after purchasing my first liquidation pallet. I documented my experience here (just in case you’ve never read it).

…lo and behold, it hit me! I’ve been selling through Fulfillment by Amazon for a year now! In fact, it was exactly one year ago today that I sold my very first item via FBA.

Let’s take a look at that monumental sale:

I sold this VHS tape from that liquidation pallet for $19.99 and paid what amounted to $0.06 for it. Let’s just say that I have been hooked on Amazon since then!

Anyways, there’s no way I can let this night end without celebrating! 🙂

The statistics for businesses that fail within the first year are pretty high. I know that this statistic is generally geared towards brick and mortar businesses, however, I believe the same can be said for online businesses. I can clearly remember the ways that I made money online prior to reselling. I invested in HYIPs (very risky and stupid — but also very profitable), I designed and sold niche websites, I wrote for websites like Demand Studios, I participated in “freebie trading,” I did a lot of affiliate marketing and PPC marketing, and I even sold products that I created on Internet Marketing forums. None of those ventures have produced the type of results that reselling has and I am thankful to have made it a full year as a reseller — and not just make it, but actually become profitable! (I can’t say the same for all of the other routes that I took.)

Hopefully you got a chance to read my previous blog post regarding my first experience selling during fourth quarter (Q4). That post pretty much sucked all of the content out of this post and consequently, this may be my shortest income report ever — or not — since I tend to be long-winded! 🙂

Usually I would add my disclaimer right about here, but to be quite honest, I put in more than 15 hours per week the first three weeks of the month so I cannot claim to have worked the usual 2-10 hours per week that I did prior to December. Instead, I estimate that I put in anywhere from 2 to 6 hours per day in December with the exception of Christmas week when I took a break. Also, I put in the most hours on New Years Eve and New Years day in order to get the last of our inventory out for January. Between my husband and I, we put in an 8 hour day on those two days because we had that much inventory to process. (Unfortunately, we let it accumulate over the holidays because we stopped packing and shipping items the week of Christmas.)

With that out of the way, let’s get right into December’s numbers.

eBay Sales

There is nothing to report on the eBay front for the month of the December. Literally…nothing. I didn’t sell one single item and I think this might be the first (or possibly the second) time this has happened.

Now that the rush of holiday sales is over, I can finally sit down and detail how things went in regards to my first fourth quarter (Q4) selling on Amazon using FBA and also as a merchant fulfilled seller. As I stated in my last few blog posts, I went into this selling season with no prior Q4 experience underneath my belt. Everything that occurred was definitely a learning experience and has given me more insight as to what to focus on if I’m still selling online during the next fourth quarter.

Was Q4 really that good?

If you have been selling online for any length of time, you may have noticed that the closer you get to October, the more often you will begin to see the term “Q4” pop up at least once a day if you are active in any online reselling community. I could not go a day without reading someone talking about Q4 and how wild it is. To be quite honest, I was originally going to write that Q4 was slightly “hyped up” in my opinion — until it ended. You see, once the holiday buying ended, I noticed a sharp decrease in my sales (as shown further below). I became so used to waking up and seeing a flood of sales that I completely lost track of what my sales actually looked prior to Q4. To be fair, I also wasn’t engaged in any type of retail buying before Q4 like I was during the end of October through December.

Welcome to my blog! I'm a stay at home mom that got sick and tired of her student loans and decided to do something about it to get rid of them as fast as possible.

I resell for profit. Yes, I'm one of "those" people -- and I intend to use the funds from my part-time pursuits to pay off Sallie Mae -- hopefully before the end of 2016.

I enjoy the thrill of the hunt, whether it is via thrifting, garage sales, retail arbitrage, or even an estate sale.
...stick around, you just may learn a thing or two.